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en-usTechdirt. Stories about "ncaa"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Wed, 2 Aug 2017 10:46:54 PDTNCAA Strips UCF Kicker Of Eligibility After He Refuses To Stop Being An Athlete That Posts YouTube VideosTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170801/09182637898/ncaa-strips-ucf-kicker-eligibility-after-he-refuses-to-stop-being-athlete-that-posts-youtube-videos.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170801/09182637898/ncaa-strips-ucf-kicker-eligibility-after-he-refuses-to-stop-being-athlete-that-posts-youtube-videos.shtml
You may recall that several months ago, we discussed Donald de la Haye, kicker for UCF and a very good YouTube personality to boot. After racking up thousands of subscribers and millions of views at his YouTube channel, where de la Haye discusses all manner of things, including his football career, the NCAA came a-calling. The organization first informed him that he would have to shutter his channel completely, arguing that the advertising revenue it generated violated NCAA rules, which are designed to make sure that all student athlete activity that generates revenue does so only in the direction of the NCAA. Then, after the backlash, the NCAA reportedly offered to let de la Haye keep his YouTube channel, but only if he agreed to essentially never reference who he is or what one of his primary life activities is: football. It was a deal devoid of sense, as his football playing career is among the primary motivators for people to check his channel out to begin with. It's also a strange stance coming from an organization purportedly in the business of supporting student athletes as they become full-fledged adults, limiting his creative expression over a concern of YouTube revenue from his own fans.

De La Haye has been ruled ineligible for the upcoming college football season, according to the NCAA. De La Haye had an opportunity to make a deal with the NCAA that would limit his creative output, but he declined it. De La Haye did not respond to our request for comment, instead tweeting that he’s “mind blown” and passing along the following message:

Here's the tweet.

All I wanted was to keep inspiring and motivating others through my content. Didn't know it would cost me my education.

Now, the NCAA apologists have already started making noise about how the NCAA was upfront with de la Haye about all of this and only asked that he not take advertising revenue or not discuss his football career. And it appears that both claims are absolutely true. Many, because of that, are falling into the trap of thinking that this was somehow an acceptable deal for de la Haye to take, or for the NCAA to offer in the first place. It is neither of those things.

The NCAA is a money-making machine. Full stop. As a money-making machine in league with higher learning institutions of grown men and women, to baldly offer to allow creative expression of a student athlete if and only if it can control that student's message and expression is insane. We're not talking about de la Haye getting endorsements or signing merchandise, or any of the other examples of things that might threaten his status as an amateur athlete that happens to contribute to the NCAA making millions of dollars. Instead, we're talking about a purely creative output published directly to fans of de la Haye. Censoring it and threatening his educational career in the name of college sports revenue is disgusting.

Fear not, because the days of the NCAA are numbered. Still, the damage it can do in the early stages of its death throes is gross.

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]]>nice-speech-you-have-there...https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20170801/09182637898Thu, 15 Jun 2017 13:25:00 PDTNCAA Forces UCF Football Player To Choose Between His Athletic Career And His YouTube ChannelTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170613/09445137576/ncaa-forces-ucf-football-player-to-choose-between-his-athletic-career-his-youtube-channel.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170613/09445137576/ncaa-forces-ucf-football-player-to-choose-between-his-athletic-career-his-youtube-channel.shtml
While we've talked about the NCAA in the past, those conversations have mostly revolved around the NCAA's backwards thinking regarding the streaming of sporting events and issues about the likenesses of players appearing in video games. Unsaid from what I can tell, however, is the general opinion of this writer that the NCAA is an outdated institution designed to make gobs of money off of the labor of otherwise free citizens while curtailing their rights to make any income themselves. These attempts to make income by college athletes typically revolve around selling autographs, memorabillia, and game-worn clothing, but the NCAA is perfectly capable of taking its rules to ridiculous lengths.

De La Haye’s channel has published 41 videos over the past year, piling up 54,000 subscribers and two million views in that time. His videos are nearly all related to his athletic career, though only a few directly address his status as UCF’s kicker; others are simply videos showing off his daily kicking regime and ability to boot a flatscreen TV from a ledge. As De La Haye stated in his latest video, entitled “Quit College Sports Or Quit YouTube,” because he was profiting from ads placed on his videos and channel homepage, the NCAA determined that he was profiting off his own likeness—the nerve!—and put its foot down.

As is the case with everything to do with the NCAA, this is about where this advertising money is going and not the actual conduct of De La Haye. The NCAA's stance is that it is perfectly fine for athletes to generate money based on their activities, it's just that the money generated must end up in the NCAA's coffers instead of in the bank accounts of the athletes that perform on the field of play. If that sounds like slavery to you, the NCAA would like to remind you that some of these athletes get college scholarships. But not all of them do, of course, and the value of those scholarships pales in comparison to the revenue generated by these athletes for the NCAA and its member institutions. It's a terrible deal for college athletes, all the more so when the NCAA is now in the habit of prohibiting speech in the form of these kinds of videos just because some advertising revenue is generated.

Revenue, by the way, that appears to be going to De La Haye's family instead of bling.

De La Haye intimated in his 10-minute video that he had been using some of the money made from his channel to help his family at home—he hails from Costa Rica—saying they have, “tons of bills piling up and there’s no way for me to help. I thought I found a way.”

The NCAA may have once served a purpose, but it needs to die a very quick death in the present. Any organization that wants to keep an enterprising college student athlete from making YouTube videos has demonstrated its need to be exited.

The NCAA was done in by a variety of factors, but it appears that its own economic expert did not help matters. While he argued that the NCAA's activities were "legal" he also more or less helped make the case that they were violating antitrust laws:

Dr. Noll’s opinions are consistent with the opinions of the
NCAA’s own economic expert, Dr. Daniel Rubinfeld, who testified
that the NCAA operates as a “joint venture which imposes
restraints” on trade.... Dr. Rubinfeld
specifically acknowledged that “the NCAA does impose a restraint,
the restraint we have been discussing in this case.” Id.
2921:8-:9. Although he opined that this restraint was lawful
because it serves procompetitive purposes, he never denied that
the NCAA restricts competition among its members for recruits. In
fact, his own economics textbook specifically refers to the NCAA
as a “cartel,” which he defined during his testimony as “a group
of firms that impose a restraint.” ... Although the
NCAA’s other economic expert, Dr. Lauren Stiroh, testified that
the NCAA does not restrain competition in any market, her opinions
were based on the theory that anticompetitive effects cannot arise
unless consumers in a “downstream market” are harmed.... In this case, those consumers would be people who
watch or attend college football and basketball games or purchase
goods using the names, images, and likenesses of student-athletes.
The Court rejects Dr. Stiroh’s theory that Plaintiffs cannot show
any anticompetitive effects caused by the alleged restraint
without demonstrating some harm to these consumers. The evidence
cited above demonstrates that student-athletes themselves are
harmed by the price-fixing agreement among FBS football and
Division I basketball schools. In the complex exchange
represented by a recruit’s decision to attend and play for a
particular school, the school provides tuition, room and board,
fees, and book expenses, often at little or no cost to the school.
The recruit provides his athletic performance and the use of his
name, image, and likeness. However, the schools agree to value
the latter at zero by agreeing not to compete with each other to
credit any other value to the recruit in the exchange. This is an
anticompetitive effect. Thus, the Court finds that the NCAA has
the power -- and exercises that power -- to fix prices and
restrain competition in the college education market that
Plaintiffs have identified.

The court goes further, in noting that the NCAA's restrictions on student athlete compensation aren't justified, going through the long history of how the NCAA's views have changed over time:

The Court finds that the NCAA's current restrictions on student-athlete compensation, which cap athletics-based financial aid below the cost of attendance, are not justified by the definition of amateurism set forth in its current bylaws.

The court also completely rejects the claims by the NCAA that it's popularity is based on the fact that athletes aren't compensated.

Other historical evidence suggests that the NCAA’s
restrictions on student-athlete compensation have not contributed
significantly to the popularity of FBS football and Division I
basketball. The NCAA’s former president, the late Walter Byers,
testified during his 2007 deposition, for instance, that the
NCAA’s decision to remove incidental expenses from the grant-in-aid coverage in 1975 was not motivated by a desire to increase
consumer demand for its product.... In fact, he specifically noted that NCAA sports
experienced a tremendous growth in popularity during the period between 1956 and 1975 when grants-in-aid still covered the full
cost of attendance.

In the end, it becomes clear that the NCAA is acting in a manner that pretty clearly violates antitrust law:

Because FBS football and Division I basketball schools are
the only suppliers in the relevant market, they have the power,
when acting in concert through the NCAA and its conferences, to
fix the price of their product. They have chosen to exercise this
power by forming an agreement to charge every recruit the same
price for the bundle of educational and athletic opportunities
that they offer: to wit, the recruit’s athletic services along
with the use of his name, image, and likeness while he is in
school. If any school seeks to lower this fixed price -- by
offering any recruit a cash rebate, deferred payment, or other
form of direct compensation -- that school may be subject to
sanctions by the NCAA.

This price-fixing agreement constitutes a restraint of trade.
The evidence presented at trial makes clear that, in the absence
of this agreement, certain schools would compete for recruits by
offering them a lower price for the opportunity to play FBS
football or Division I basketball while they attend college.
Indeed, the NCAA’s own expert, Dr. Rubinfeld, acknowledged that
the NCAA operates as a cartel that imposes a restraint on trade in
this market.

The court rejects the idea that free tuition is a reasonable exchange, noting that the licensing rights the student athletes give up is clearly worth much, much more.

While the court does find antitrust problems, it's interesting to note that it does not find harm done to the video game licensing market. After saying that such a market would likely exist without the NCAA's rules, that doesn't mean there's anti-competitive harm:

Nevertheless, Plaintiffs have not identified any injury to
competition within this submarket. Just as in the live
telecasting submarket, the ultimate buyers in this submarket --
videogame developers -- would need to acquire group licenses from
a specific set of teams in order to create their product. This
set might include all of the teams within Division I, all of the
teams within the major conferences, or some other set of teams
that the videogame developer believed would be necessary to
produce a marketable product. Regardless of which teams were
included within that set, those teams would not compete against
each other as sellers of group licenses, even in the absence of
the challenged rules, because they would all share an interest in
ensuring that the videogame developer acquired each of the group
licenses required to create its product. These teams would also
not compete against any teams outside of the set because the
videogame developer determined that those other teams’ group
licenses were not required to produce the videogame. Indeed,
competition between teams (or conferences) is even less likely in
the videogame submarket than the live telecasting submarket
because videogame developers -- unlike television networks -- are
not constrained by the number of group licenses that they could
use to produce their product. The evidence presented at trial
demonstrates that videogame companies could, and often did,
feature nearly every FBS football and Division I basketball team
in their videogames. Under these circumstances, competition among
individual teams and conferences to sell group licenses is
extremely unlikely. And, to the extent that it happens (or would
happen), it is not restrained by the challenged NCAA restrictions
on student-athlete compensation. Thus, just as with the live
telecasting submarket, the challenged rules do not suppress
competition in this submarket.

Either way, the NCAA is going to appeal this decision -- but if it stands, it will likely have a pretty big impact on the nature of college sports going forward, changing the ways in which student athletes are compensated in general. The NCAA is ordered to allow colleges to offer to share licensing revenue with students (and refuses to have the ruling stayed, though it doesn't go into effect just yet anyway -- and it's possible that the appeals court would grant a stay also).

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]]>antitrusthttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20140808/17322628159Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:33:41 PSTPrison Sponsor Tries To Delete Wikipedia Information After Sponsoring NCAA Football StadiumTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130221/10072122058/prison-sponser-tries-to-delete-wikipedia-information-after-sponsoring-ncaa-football-stadium.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130221/10072122058/prison-sponser-tries-to-delete-wikipedia-information-after-sponsoring-ncaa-football-stadium.shtmlpotential benefits of being a great Wiki editor, are far beyond any negative effects of false information. And, for anyone who does attempt to game the information on the site, the consequences can be awful.

Take, for instance, what has happened now that Geo Group, a company that runs for-profit prisons, has a spokesman running around trying to delete negative information about them from their Wikipedia page. This began shortly after Geo Group inked a deal with Florida Atlantic University for the naming rights to their football stadium, because nothing says irony quite like a prison name for college football, where the athletes are grossly exploited for the profit of the NCAA.

This, obviously, is seen as bad form on Wikipedia and editors almost immediately began fighting back, both restoring the deleted section and calling out Cohen. But Abe wasn't done. After the page was restored, an anonymous IP address which leads back to Geo Group's servers showed up on the page claiming that the PR information Abe had added wasn't PR information at all, but was an accurate reflection of the company's history.

The result of all this nonsense? Well, none of it is good for Geo Group. Deadspin picked up the story and there's little doubt their massive audience is now exponentially more aware of some of the company's more controversial moments, which include mistreatment of prisoners, withholding prisoner medication, withholding medical care for prisoners resulting in their deaths, and guards engaging in sexual intercourse with prisoners. Like me, it's likely that as of last week, most people didn't even know a company called Geo Group existed. But now, because they want to get into the football sponsorship business, and also because they think they can just remove negative information off of the internet, a whole lot of people are more informed about that negative information.

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]]>ain't gonna workhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130221/10072122058Fri, 8 Feb 2013 14:00:17 PSTLawsuit Over Video Game Rights Might Kill The NCAA But Not The SystemAbove The Lawhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130207/15002421913/lawsuit-over-video-game-rights-might-kill-ncaa-not-system.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130207/15002421913/lawsuit-over-video-game-rights-might-kill-ncaa-not-system.shtmlCross-posted from
I don't particularly like the NCAA and I enjoy their legal difficulties as much as the next guy. As a devout college sports fan, the usually arbitrary and always backward business side of the NCAA (including the affiliated schools and "non-profit" bowl associations) causes me great consternation.

Apparently, the incomparable Charles P. Pierce shares my disdain for the lumbering excuse for a fair and credible sanctioning body that currently governs collegiate athletics.

In a sharp Grantland piece, Pierce revisits the Ed O'Bannon-led class-action case against the NCAA and video game manufacturer EA over their combined efforts to profit in perpetuity from the likenesses of unpaid "student ath-o-letes." (Take it away Eric Cartman!) But I think Pierce is overselling the extent to which a possible O'Bannon victory would really change the college sports landscape....

By way of background, Ed O'Bannon is a former UCLA and pre-Brooklyn Nets basketball player who had retired from the game. It came to his attention that the NCAA had licensed his likeness to EA to make approximately a gajillion dollars selling video games featuring "classic" teams like O'Bannon's 1996 UCLA Bruins. O'Bannon felt -- and he was later joined by basketball legends like Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson, who were stunned to learn a) that they were in a video game and b) what a video game was -- that this seemed a little far afield of putting his likeness on a calendar in 1995, which is what he reasonably assumed he was authorizing the NCAA to do when he signed away his rights to profit from the marketing of his collegiate career when he was all of 18 years old.

O'Bannon filed suit in 2009, alleging that the NCAA violated the Sherman Antitrust Act when they forced him to sign a waiver giving up his rights to profit from representations of his collegiate career. As Robert Wheel of SBNation explains:

O'Bannon is alleging that if the NCAA didn't force him to sign this contract, then he could have gotten money from someone else (say, an EA competitor) to use his likeness. Thus, it essentially fixed the price of using his image at zero. Even if you consider players' scholarships adequate payment for their services, this still artificially depresses how much they're paid. If a judge agrees, the waiver would be considered an illegal restraint of trade under the act.

And now O'Bannon and his lawyers are seeking to certify a class of all former athletes used in this way for a trial next year (courts have held that maintaining the amateur status of current student athletes is a laudable enough goal to justify the NCAA robbing current athletes of the fruits of their potentially debilitating labor, so this case only deals with former athletes).

Which brings us to Charles Pierce's piece. You see, Judge Claudia Wilken of the Northern District of California just denied the defendants' motion to end the class certification process on the grounds that the plaintiffs have changed their legal strategy. Judge Wilken basically asked, "So?" and the defendants had no response. Pierce contends that this legal setback for the NCAA, along with recent NCAA retreats on the issue of stipends for players, portends an extinction-level event for college sports.

By and large, the people charged with running our various sports conglomerates have proven through history to be as incapable of taking the long view of their own survival as the average brachiosaurus was. They blunder around, eating whatever comes under their noses, trampling the scenery and hooting loudly into the wind. They never see the meteor coming. …

For the NCAA to survive in its current form, it has to win this lawsuit or get the lawsuit dismissed. There’s no third alternative. The NCAA can’t settle and then go back to the status quo ante. It can’t pay off O'Bannon and Russell and Robertson and all the rest of them, and then start business as usual again as regards Cody Zeller or Kenny Boynton. If it loses the lawsuit, the effect on the NCAA's financial structure would be profound. About which, at this point, the device has not yet been invented capable of measuring how little I care. Instead, I stand aside and listen to the stomping and the hooting from the thick Cretaceous rain forest, which is just loud enough to drown out the high whistling sound of something coming down from the sky.

I'm not sure comparing the NCAA to the dinosaurs makes much sense. The dinosaurs were wiped out entirely and a new world order replaced their presence. The elimination of the NCAA is more akin to the extinction of the Dodo bird: the weakest, most ineffectual player on the evolutionary stage will saunter off while the crazy dudes with guns and hunting dogs remain on top.

Or maybe Pierce is right about the extent of the mass extinction... but he forgets that the elite athletic departments and conferences aren't the dinosaurs, they’re the cockroaches. I just don't trust these folks to go quietly into the night. They'll let the NCAA take this hit regarding past licensing of "classic team" likenesses and then come up with some new regime where the individual schools capture all the revenue from licensing their own classic teams through bi-lateral agreements with manufacturers to create some semblance of a competitive market for these likenesses and go on exploiting the next generation of future former athletes.

Would that survive legal scrutiny? Maybe not, but the big power players in the sport will happily drag out the issue as long as possible to capture as much profit as possible, even at the expense of the weaker sports schools who would lose out without the NCAA dividing the licensing pot. But for a major athletic department, this is no time for communism! There's already a roadmap out there to ditch the NCAA and kill off the weaker sports schools leaching off the strong.

So the NCAA might die, but for the players themselves, the motto would be "meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

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]]>the system always lives onhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130207/15002421913Tue, 14 Aug 2012 05:43:51 PDTHoney Badger Don't Care... Unless You're Cheering On A College Player With That NicknameMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120813/07425420005/honey-badger-dont-care-unless-youre-cheering-college-player-with-that-nickname.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120813/07425420005/honey-badger-dont-care-unless-youre-cheering-college-player-with-that-nickname.shtmlbootleg merchandise based on the phrase "fear the brow!" which is associated with him because of his prominent unibrow. Of course, after graduating and turning pro, Davis immediately sought the trademark on the phrase, so that only he could profit from it. But now, Stephan Kinsella points us to another college athlete for whom "bootleg" apparel is apparently an issue. LSU football player Tyrann Mathieu has been nicknamed "Honey Badger" after this famous memetastic YouTube video about how "Honey Badger don't care."

Not surprisingly, fans of Mathieu want to support him, and have created various apparel and signs and the like, making use of the Honey Badger name, as well as statements from the video. All of this resulted in LSU warning that Honey Badger Does Care and that its "Compliance Office" was sending out cease & desist letters to any products that have the name or likeness of Mathieu, including the phrase "honey badger" accompanied by Mathieu's uniform number (7), his name, image or anything that associates it with LSU.

Now, much of this is because of completely asinine NCAA rules against selling products that advertise student athletes (even without their knowledge or permission). But, the overall concept seems even more ridiculous when you realize that the whole Honey Badger meme comes from somewhere else entirely. Is it really that wrong that fans of Mathieu want to celebrate a player they like?

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]]>intellectual-property-gone-madhttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120813/07425420005Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:15:45 PDTNCAA Goes Backwards On Streaming The Basketball TournamentTimothy Geignerhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120316/06110318128/ncaa-goes-backwards-streaming-basketball-tournament.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120316/06110318128/ncaa-goes-backwards-streaming-basketball-tournament.shtmlthe MLB, NBA, NFL, and NHL, the NCAA Basektball Tournament got it right, partnering with broadcasters to stream the games to their sites free of charge, with all the advertising one would expect on television. It was a wonderful method for ensuring that one of my monitors at work had their games on. It made it certain that I'd be that weird guy staring at images on his phone while taking the train home from work. It confused my neighbors as to how I could somehow simultaneously grill steaks on my deck while announcers went ballistic over last second hail mary shots as time ran out on the clock. I was engaged (sorry Mom and Dad, I mean engaged to the game).

And now they've taken that all away from me. To be fair, they're still streaming the games. And they promise that the streams will work across multiple platforms (computer, iPad, iPhone, Android devices, etc.). And it only costs $4.99 for the entire tournament.

But that's where the lie in all this is. It's not just $4.99 to watch the tournament on every device other than my television (where it's FREE!). There are serious mental transactions to consider here. Like most red-blooded Americans, I'm in an NCAA office bracket. Something like half the games in the tournament take place during work hours across the country. Most of us don't have televisions at our desks, in our cubicles, wherever. Watching at work is kind of the whole point here, with all the ducking and dodging from our bosses we have to do as a result. Now, we can argue all we want whether watching the tourney at work is productive or a good idea, but from the NCAA's standpoint, they shouldn't care at all. They should want people to watch. Asking them to pay $4.99 to do all of this is a massive fail, particularly since all of those same advertisements that were in place remain.

So...they're charging for something that used to be free...without adding any benefit. I watched the games on their feeds the past couple of years. This year, not so much. The obvious question is does the money they're making from the $4.99/subscriber outweigh the eyeballs that are no longer watching the advertising because of that cost. Maybe those in the comments can change my mind, but I'm fairly certain there's more folks like me out there than people buying the "package".

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]]>same-service,-now-for-a-fee!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120316/06110318128Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:24:00 PDTThe First Rule Of NCAA March Madness Is You Can't Mention NCAA March MadnessMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100323/1029358675.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100323/1029358675.shtmlthe Olympics and we've seen it with the World Cup... and now we're seeing it with the NCAA men's basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. This week, of course, some of the games will be played in Syracuse (including, I feel the urgent need to mention, the surprise of the tournament, my alma mater Cornell), and jsl4980 was the first of a few of you to send in the news that local businesses are being told they cannot mention the fact that the tournament is being held there. No local businesses are allowed to "welcome" fans or players for the event. They can't mention the NCAA event is happening, or that we're at the "Sweet Sixteen" level.

Of course, that's all according to the NCAA, which is basically lying. They're abusing the rights that trademark law gives them to try to restrict free speech on factual information, in a misguided effort to squeeze more money out of sponsors, by pretending that only sponsors can mention the event. But trademark law does not give you blanket control over the trademarked terms -- and presenting factual information, or welcoming people to a city by mentioning an event that is absolutely happening there should not be considered trademark infringement in the slightest.

Apparently, in the past the NCAA wasn't as abusive of trademarks, but it's learned a thing or two by watching how other sporting events abuse trademark law, and now everyone seems to be bending over backwards assuming that just because the NCAA forbids something that they have the legal right to do so.

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]]>where's-that-happening?-shhhhhh!https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100323/1029358675Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:55:00 PSTNCAA Tries To Bully Fan Discussion Site Into Handing Over Its Domain NameMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0113347336.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091214/0113347336.shtmloverly restrictive views at times -- is trying to bully the owner of the discussion website NCAAbbs.com into handing over its domain names. The NCAA is, not surprisingly, complaining that any domain name that includes NCAA automatically should belong to the NCAA. Of course, it's not so simple. While the NCAA does have a trademark on its name, that doesn't mean it gets automatic control over any site that uses NCAA in its domain name. The NCAAbbs site is clearly not associated with the NCAA and is pretty clearly just a fan discussion site. The owner of the site says that he's planning to fight the demand, and hopefully he can succeed. While the domain dispute process can be a bit arbitrary, the courts have often realized that a trademark holder does not get full control over every domain that mentions them. Hopefully, that will be the case here as well. Of course, the one area where it's pretty clear that you can keep such a domain name is in cases of "sucks sites." So perhaps if the NCAA wins this, the owner can simple relocate to NCAAreallysucks.com.

More to the point, however, you have to wonder what the NCAA thinks it's doing here. You have a site that has been set up to promote the NCAA and all of the various sports teams within the NCAA. This is an incredibly useful promotional tool that the NCAA should be celebrating and helping rather than attacking. Why do so many organizations think it's smart to threaten, attack or sue their biggest fans?

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]]>how-about-ncaasucks.com?https://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20091214/0113347336Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:47:00 PDTCopyright Dispute Leads To NFL Not Scouting College JuniorsMike Masnickhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091026/0411426676.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20091026/0411426676.shtmlBrooks writes "For once it looks like the NFL isn't the bad guy in an intellectual property dispute, and actually are the ones trying to explain some of the issues with copyright maximalism to colleges. The problem is that the company who records scouting tapes for eight major conferences has convinced colleges that the NFL should pay for the right to use those tapes to scout players, in particular juniors who are trying to decide whether to enter the draft.

From the NFL's point of view, the junior scouting program exists to help keep kids in school if they're unlikely to succeed in the draft in their junior year (it's certainly in the NFL's interest to have those kids continue to develop their talent for one more year). The colleges, of course, see the "value" the tapes bring to the NFL and want a piece of that pie. So far, the NFL seems to be sticking to its guns and basically saying "fine, we just won't scout your players." The dispute has escalated to the point where some colleges aren't even letting NFL scouts look at tape on campus.

There's a bit of a sweet good-for-the-gander element to the story, since the NFL has been on the other side of the content value argument pretty much forever. It does kind of suck, though, that some college juniors will be entering the draft based on overoptimistic expectations. And it can't be good for a college's football program if it becomes known that it doesn't allow NFL scouting."

Yes, you read that right. It seems that the in this era of copyright maximalism, a company is trying to claim copyright on scouting tapes that are helpful to everyone (teams get better scouting info to make decisions, players are more accurately ranked, etc.). A friend who follows minor league baseball mentioned this week that Major League Baseball just took down its own scouting videos that had been online, so I'm wondering if baseball is now facing a similar problem as well.